Plumbing the mind

There is good technology out there

Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of Turbulent Water

In the years since owning my home, I have affixed lighting, run wires, constructed ceilings, and erected walls. I even cut a gigantic hole with a concrete saw. Water, however, has never been my friend. So when two shut-off valves in my basement started spraying water on Saturday, I called for a plumber.

One of the great ironies of our technological era is that despite having access to infinite discovery and information—meaning, I can Google research anything I want for hours and hours—I never know how to find a reputable technician in the great sea of noise. Instead of bothering my friends on a weekend (this was my first mistake), I pilfered through a stack of coupons my little son had left on the bathroom counter.

You know the ones! The coupons come in blue spam envelopes offering discounts from a hundred different local companies. The only good they serve is to act as monopoly money for my four year old and to apparently direct market to me in a time of desperation. In my defense, how hard is plumbing? Their online reviews were good. Surely any company can stop a leak.

My first call was quick and kind. This is one of the best features of a managerial society. People dislike other people who are rude. Therefore, customer service staff are held to the highest standards of kindness. Like all other services in the world, they recorded nearly all my biographical information shy of blood type and social security number. Next, they put me on the schedule and told me I would receive a call later in the day regardless of whether a technician could come out same-day. All fine — the bucket takes about a day to fill anyways.

What I experienced next cascaded into the truly bizarre. I missed the call-back because it came during dinnertime (hello, my five children set fire to the house nearly every dinner), so I returned the call around 5:45pm to a technological scolding: “you missed the call from the technician.” Yes, so I did. Can we talk now? “Yes, but now I have to find them again.” Easy enough.

For the next fifty (!) minutes, I sat on the phone while the very kind customer representative tried to “find me in the computer” and locate my technician. This is one of the worst features of a managerial society: the uncompromising devotion to machine. It was unimportant that the representative and I had spoken just hours earlier and she had left me a voicemail ten minutes prior. She remembered me. But the machine did not! Worse, it was clear I had offended her and the machine by being present to my family during dinner. How could I not have answered?

Now look, I understand that many modern companies are an expensive scam. By scam, I mean to imply that this plumbing company is not actually a plumbing company but a highly scaled technology company that employs software to lord their ‘Plumbing LLC’ over other smaller LLC’s—the real plumbers. These big umbrella companies connect all the dots and unite customers with technicians, profiting off the margins between the two. If you are unaware of this fact, you live under a rock. I only bring this up to emphasize that I really do understand why I was sitting on the phone repeating my complicated last name over and over.

As time wore on, the perversity of the whole exchange became obvious. My wife was making faces at me, but I was all in on this. I could have given all my information ten times in the period I waited. But there was a technician somewhere in the state of Virginia waiting to service me. I had failed the machine and, in turn, the machine was failing him. For my part, I spent most of that time clearing the kitchen table and washing dishes (despite all my complaints about technology, wireless headphones are a gift from God). This was my after-dinner entertainment.

At the end of this long telephone journey, she finally located me. The sound of her voice was so triumphant, I questioned my own existence. It turns out that I had been categorized incorrectly by the initial intake process and got lumped into the CRM database for a different company owned by that same parent company (whoops). Once found, a plumbing technician called me back within minutes only to express his condolences: "sorry, we don't carry shut-off valves—it could take two weeks to order.” For a moment I imagined dumping buckets of water for two weeks and then suddenly woke up. This depraved sociological experiment had gone too far. In righteous anger, I mentioned the dozens of shut-off valves available at Home Depot, apologized, and said goodbye. What plumber has no pipes?

It was too late to find a solution that night, so I retired the search until early Monday morning when my (now fully engaged and tired of dumping buckets) wife found several recommendations from close friends. The first call I made lasted twenty seconds and went something like this, “yea yea cool I’ll be there tomorrow at 2pm. OK? This is my cell phone. Please text me your address,” and hung up.

I have no idea if he will be a good plumber, but at least he is not afraid of pipes. Perhaps there are good uses of technology out there. We just need to find them.